Her eyes, always frightfully blue, were darkened and wide with—with what?
She raised a hand to touch him and he stepped back, then bolted to the washroom. He skimmed off his clothes and stepped into the shower, turning on the faucet and holding up his face to a spray of hot water. The last time he’d seen her face shrouded with such sorrow was when she stepped off the plane from helping Sylvie bring Chris home. From straight across the tarmac as he stood inside the airport watching her through the thick panes of glass he had seen her sorrow. Seen it in the way she kept her chin erect. In the way her eyes had determinedly sought his through the crowd gathering around and watching alongside of him. And he’d been surprised by such sorrow, for he’d expected to see in her eyes the keener suffering of grief instead. Three babies buried from the womb: she knew grief. Knew its dark and twisted path all fraught with madness and hate and fear and its narrowed arteries choking with self-blame. And perhaps she hadn’t the strength to walk through it again. Or, as he’d seen when she reached back through the doorway of the plane that day and helped Sylvie’s shocked-bent body through the narrow cylinder, perhaps her knowing disallowed another indulgent walk. Perhaps she’d learned how hope eventually creeps through darkness, making inroads through to an easier tomorrow. And that was her task then, to bear her grief with a hope that might shelter him and Sylvie through the coming days. And she had. Cradled and carried them as much as they would allow her. Oftentimes this past year, despite Sylvanus’s drinking, hope continued to grow in her eyes and he’d been turning to it more and more, hoping to offset the grey clouding his.
Water sluiced down his back, scrubbing the day’s dirt off his skin. It caressed the smooth humps of his buttocks and streamed down the backs of his legs and plashed around his feet before suckling itself down the drain. He kept his face to the jettisoning spray of the nozzle and felt its heat flush open his pores and he flattened his hands against the shower stall as though keeping his insides from being flushed out and sucked down the drain along with the water. He had bolted from her that day at the airport, too. Bolted out onto the highway and thumbed a ride with a trucker who left him sitting in silence, staring out the side window. At Hampden Junction he climbed out of the truck with a grateful nod and started running the ten miles home, jumping into the ditch and cowering whenever he heard a car coming because he didn’t want anyone seeing him, didn’t want to talk, didn’t know what to say or do since that one ring of the phone had altered his being and it felt like somebody else was running in his shoes. When he got home, the house was swarming with aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who’d been coming and going since the news swept through the outport like a squall of wind. Young Chris was killed. Killed on the oil rigs in Alberta. An accident, a bad accident.
Cut through him, too. Had loosened his bowels and sunk a hole in his stomach that all else sank into. He would’ve liked to cry. But the good folk kept shouldering him, kept finding him as he tried to hide. Kept bringing him back amongst them, rubbing his back and laughing and nudging him to laugh when they did. He did. Shame creeping up his face once, when he laughed too hard and imagined his mother and father hearing him from their torn pillows. And perhaps dear old Gran had heard him too as she lay in her room with her own host of women keeping vigil and wiping her teary eyes with tissues pulled from their too full bosoms.
He wished they could have soothed him. He wished they could have filled that hole cratering his stomach and helped him straighten his legs from their cramped fetus curl and make him feel whole again. He had gnawed his nails and held back his cries till his throat ached and his fingers bled and Chris was buried and they’d all left and then he cried. He cried all the time. Crawled behind the woodpile and cried. Crawled beneath Chris’s old workshirt in the woodshed and cried. Cried walking home from the bar in Hampden and from the beach fires at night, leaning into the space where Chris had always walked beside him, grunting like a bear sometimes to scare him.
His mother kept looking to him, willing him to share his grief with her, to let her share hers with him, but he couldn’t. Frightened that the weight of her pain would fuse with his own, toppling him. He couldn’t bear being with Sylvie, either. Couldn’t bear it. Afraid of the shame or guilt or grief that was robbing her eyes of light. Afraid she might talk, might tell him what really happened that day on the rigs and what she had or hadn’t done that might’ve prevented it, and he wanted nothing of it. It was an accident. An accident—cold, clean words that evoked no image. They evoked no thoughts, no questions that might send him raging towards her or someone else with the finger of blame and hate and condemnation. Please God. Tell me no more.
She’d tried to tell him one drunken night outside the bar. Tried holding on to him, her wet face pressed against his, and he’d pushed her away and ran and was still running. Running from everything.
He shut off the faucet and took as long as he could to dry himself and put on clean clothes. He wanted to slink into his room and bar the door, but she’d heard him.
“Go call your father, Kyle.” She was hovering over the table, holding a cast-iron frying pan, her wrist bending beneath its weight as she scooped fried potatoes onto their plates alongside pork chops and onions. He opened the door and roared out to his father and took his seat back at the table. She lay the frying pan back on the stove and came up behind him, scruffing the back of his head with her fingers, the cool tips of her nails grazing his scalp.
Jaysus! He ducked away. “Still groping for head lice,” he said, feeling sheepish as he always did when she showed him affection.
She went back to the sink and he listened to her kitchen sounds. It was his favourite thing when Chris had first left for Alberta, sitting at the table and munching toast and reading a comic and half listening as she swept and tidied, passing along bits of gossip. It was always Chris she’d talked to before. It was Chris his father had talked to. And then, with Chris flying off with Sylvie, they both started sitting with him and chatting him up and cripes it was nice and he was often feeling like the sun between a pair of sundogs.
Then the call. The chatting stopped. And he became one of those things she helped tidy before putting away.
She came back to the table and sat light as a pigeon, her dark hair pinned back, face small like a girl’s. Pale. She looked at him and smiled reassuringly and his fear deepened.
“What did you say your father was doing?”
“Fixing his rod.”
“Get any trout?”
“Water’s too high.”
“All that rain. Sure, you knew that before you left.”
“He likes going.”
“Wish he was still the warden. Only thing he liked more than fishing cod was guarding that river.” Her hands were steadied as she sugared her tea and poured in a drop of milk.
“Might get the salmon back yet,” he said. “Open the river agin. Get his job back.”
“I hope he finds something soon. Keep his mind occupied.” She lapsed into silence and his stomach rolled. “Eat your supper,” she said.
He picked up his fork.
“Did you hear about Clar Gillard?” she asked. “Tied Bonnie to a chair at the fish plant and sprayed her with oven cleaner.”
“What!”
“That’s what he did, then. The cook hove a pan of cold water over her soon as he started, but she still got burns on her skin.”
“Didn’t she leave him months ago?”
“Still treats her like he owns her. Barbarous
